Support for Alternative Layouts
This is a summary of how alternative layouts have been supported by kits such as Colevrak and Homing. It is not a discussion of alt layout performance and development, but if that interests you I highly recommend starting with Pascal Getreuer’s A guide to alt keyboard layouts (why, how, which one?). It’s a concise and comprehensive overview with links to some great sites that go deeper. He also has a separate Links about keyboards page. The Keyboard layouts doc he recommends explains layout goals and metrics in detail, summarizing the alt layouts discussed here as well as more than one hundred others. Sculpted-profile The majority of custom keycap sets are sculpted-profile (Cherry, SA, MT3, KAT, etc. - more on profiles generally here) so let’s start there. Because each row has a unique keycap shape, alt layouts require a unique keycap for each legend that moves off its QWERTY row. At first there were two The Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak & William L....
Apr 23, 2024
This is the most accurate and succinct summary of the warning signs situation that I have seen. Well done
I think of it this way: the fact that MD and SP were willing to take that loss on the warning signs as opposed to upping the price for everyone (which in my opinion would have been justified) is that they wanted to keep the community happy. Why did they want to keep the community happy?? Because they want us to participate in future GBs so they can continue making money off of our purchases. If anything, the choice of MD and SP to eat that loss shows that they fully expect many more keycap GBs in the future; they wouldn't be willing to lose $11k in revenue if they didn't think there were going to be a lot more keycap groupbuys to recoup that loss.
You can keep your $~15 and rest easy that Massdrop will continue to pump out new key cap drops.
In fact, as soon as this one ends, another hugely anticipated one is going to pop up shortly after.